12 Rules for Life Tour - Brisbane, Australia.

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] Well, thank you. It's remarkable to see all of you here in this amazing room. So, I hope we have an interesting and engaging time tonight. That's the plan I've got. I have a lecture planned, so it's got a strange title. It's not that exciting, really. The first part of it is "The Socialization of the Value Hierarchy," and the second is "The Estimation of the Magnitude of Error." It's like you wouldn't think you'd come and sit in here to listen to that talk, really, would you? I'm not sure I would. But it is interesting. It's a very, very interesting problem.

And here’s part of what the problem is: part of the problem I’m trying to solve is how is your emotional stability tied up with your social identity? That’s a really important question, and I think it might be the central question that I've been pursuing my entire life, as long as I've been able to think intellectually. That might be the problem that I've been pursuing, because one of the things I've been interested in is why people are so committed to their group identity, let's say, or their group beliefs, that they will, well, let’s say, go to war to protect them or to spread them, or that they will commit atrocities hypothetically in defense of them.

So, it's a very interesting problem. You know, when people think about the motivation for war, for example, they often attribute it to economic causes, and that just never struck me as plausible. Sometimes it's plausible, but it’s not a deep solution, as far as I'm concerned. It's more psychological. Our beliefs are important to us. And what does it mean? Well, there are a lot of questions there. What do you mean by belief exactly? Physicists generally don’t go to war over their belief in one physical theory over another, so it can't be just as simple as belief. It has to be more complicated than that.

And people are committed to their beliefs too, and it isn’t obvious what commitment means. So those are the things that I've been trying to unpack: What does it mean to have a belief, and why is it crucial to you? There's something deeply associated between belief and value. So then that brings up another question: What exactly do you mean by value? That's three hard questions, and that's part of it.

Then, the error magnitude problem is, let’s say you go to a party, and you tell a joke, and you know, you think it's a pretty funny joke, and you tell your joke and no one laughs. In fact, they look at you like you're rather odd. Then the question is, well, how should you respond to that? What exactly does that indicate about you? I mean, does it indicate a minor flaw in an otherwise stellar personality? Because that's a possibility. Or does it mean that you're a creep right down to the core? And you know, you could even think the less that you think it means that you're a creep, the more likely it is that you are one.

But you know it's very hard to estimate the magnitude of an error. How upset should you get when something that you don't want to happen happens? And it's very, very hard to figure that out. If you wake up in the morning and you know you have a pain, say, in your side, or you're not feeling particularly well, it's like, well, how upset should you get about that? One answer is, well, maybe you're going to die in three months; maybe that's the beginning of pancreatic cancer, and that's the end of you. So maybe you should just be terrified into paralysis when you have a pain that you can't explain, or maybe you should just brush it off and think, well, you know, I’ll get up and do what I usually do, and it’s probably nothing.

And sometimes you're right with the "it’s probably nothing" approach, and sometimes if you don't go to the physician right away because you have some relatively trivial pain, then you're dead. This problem of estimating magnitude, of error, and the importance of error is an unbelievably difficult problem. Therefore, I want to address both of those problems at the same time tonight. So, that’s the plan; we’ll see how that goes.

I want to weave in one more thing, which is this relationship between your own psychological structure, whatever that happens to be—your own value hierarchy—because there's a very tight relationship between your value hierarchy and your psychological structure. This is why hierarchies, by the way, which are necessary, which is part of the point I was trying to make say in "Rule One" in "Twelve Rules for Life" when I talked about hierarchies. There’s no getting away from hierarchies. A hierarchy is a structure that tells you that one thing takes precedence over another, that one thing is more important than another, right?

And if everything is of equal import, then nothing is more important than anything else, by definition. Then, well, what should you do? The answer is, well, you can’t tell because nothing is any more important than anything else. The definition of important fundamentally is something like that which you should do first, you know? That constitutes importance. That’s also something that’s relevant, I would say too, because a lot of the way that we look at the world is as a place in which to act.

We make a lot of judgments about the nature of the world in terms of how we should structure our action. In fact, the theory that I’m putting forth in general is a theory that’s predicated on the notion that the essential way that we look at the world is as if it’s a forum of action, like a dramatic forum, like a story. That's a good way of thinking about it. We really do view ourselves and our place in the world as a story that’s set in a narrative landscape. You might argue that that’s not the case. You could say that that viewpoint, for example, has been superseded by a scientific viewpoint, but it isn’t obvious to me that that’s the case.

And it certainly isn't the case that we act that way, or that we structure our political systems that way, or that we treat each other that way, or that we think that way, or that we react emotionally that way. And so that’s a lot. You know, it’s also the case that the other thing that’s worth thinking about in this regard is, you know, we've only been thinking about the world as an objective place for 500 years, something like that. I mean, maybe you could chase it back to the ancient Greeks and go back 2,000 years, but whatever, from a historical perspective, 500 years or 200 years is the same amount of time, and it’s a tiny fraction of the amount of time that living creatures that were approximately like us have been around.

We got along fine without thinking about the world as an objective place for a very, very long time. We survived, and here we are. It doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea, but it does imply that there are other ways of looking at the world that are highly functional and that have been conserved for, well, let’s say for evolutionary reasons. So, you know if you make the case, which you might, that what you evolve to match is reality, at least you match it well enough so that reality doesn’t kill you, which is more or less the definition of evolution.

If you evolve to match reality in some sense and the manner in which you evolve predisposes you to view the world as if it’s a narrative of sorts, then possibly the world is a narrative of sorts, at least insofar as it concerns you. Now what that means metaphysically, I don’t know, but that’s okay because who knows anything metaphysically? Virtually by definition, what’s metaphysical is beyond what you know. You can speculate, but…and you know I would speculate that there is something narrative about the structure of the world, but it doesn’t matter.

We don’t have to go down that route. We can just think about this practically. So, the first thing I want to tell you about that I think is really important to lay out the structure of this argument is something about the relationship between perception and emotion and motivation. This is actually pretty simple, but people don’t know it. I guess it’s simple in the way that complex things are simple when you think them through for a very long time and understand them and then can finally lay them out in some manner that’s relatively clear because you understand them.

I derived a fair bit of this information from a book called "The Neuropsychology of Anxiety" by a man named Jeffrey Gray, who I think was one of the two greatest neuropsychologists of the 20th century, two or three. His "Neuropsychology of Anxiety," which is on my list of recommended books, by the way, it’s a really hard book. It took me like six months to read that book, and all of it was painful. The reason for that was, well, you know, books are interesting. Some aren’t.

Often, I dog-ear the pages of books that I’m reading if I find a line or something, you know, that I’d like to remember, that I think is important. I have some books on my shelves where pages are dog-eared double because there was a really amazing thought on one page and there was a really amazing thought on the other page, right? You know, the facing page. And so, the whole damn thing is just nothing but dog ears.

Then there are other books where there are zero. When I read Nietzsche, for example, there were lots of dog ears on "Beyond Good and Evil," which is a great book. Nietzsche actually came up with the most arrogant statement anybody ever made about himself as an author, which is really quite impressive—to come up with the most arrogant statement. You know, that’s really something. And he was great at coming up with one-liners, philosophical one-liners. He said, “I can write in a sentence what it takes other people a book to write.”

Then he said, “No, they know that they can’t even write in a book.” So, that’s pretty good, eh? It’s like arrogant. And then he topped it. It’s like, yes, this is a man who could really write. Anyway, the problem with reading a book like "Beyond Good and Evil," say, is that every damn sentence is a thought, and a deep thought.

Reading "Beyond Good and Evil," it’s like just constantly being punched. I mean, partly you’re punched because you read part of it; you don’t know what the hell he says. And then, you know, you feel stupid and so then you get punched. Then every now and then you stumble across something you understand, and it’s like—it’s hard on you. He said he philosophized with a hammer. You know, that he was breaking things apart, and there’s no doubt about that. So, every now and then you run across something you understand, and then that breaks you apart because you understand it.

It takes a long time to go through the book because you have to think about it. And god, that’s not good thinking about things. Well, it isn’t, because you know when you think about it, you already know everything in some sense—you know, you’ve got a map that covers the whole world, which is sort of why you can function. As long as everything’s going fine, you don’t really have to adjust your map and you don’t have to think, but then if you come across something that makes you think, then what that means is that part of the way you were thinking was wrong.

When you think something when you’re forced to, then some little part of your map—the way you represent the world—it has to die because it was wrong. Then it has to be replaced by this new thing, and god only knows how much of what it was that was there has to die. That’s part of the magnitude of error problem. People don’t like to think.

It’s hard to read difficult books like "Beyond Good and Evil" because you’re just forced to think and think. It’s just exhausting. You wish he would just go away, you know? Which is why they’re trying not to teach difficult books in universities anymore so that people don’t have to undergo the difficult process of actually having to think and transform themselves.

Anyways, I read Jeffrey Gray’s book "The Neuropsychology of Anxiety," and it was like that. He was something, man. A student of a psychologist named Hans Eysenck, who was the most cited psychologist in the 20th century, and really quite a good psychologist. He laid a lot of the groundwork for modern theories of temperament and personality. They’ve been modified since his work, but he got extroversion right. He was the first person to really identify extroversion in a manner that could be measured. Carl Jung actually invented the notion, but Eysenck figured out how to measure it, which is a big deal.

He also noted that there was another important personality dimension, neuroticism, which is the tendency towards negative emotion, and he got that right too, because that actually happened to be the case. He figured out how to measure it. So Eysenck was the first person who really established conceptually the fact that we have two fundamental emotional systems—one positive and one negative—that they weren’t opposites exactly. They’re actually separate biological systems.

Some people can be extroverted, which means they’re quite happy and assertive. They smile a lot, they laugh a lot, they tell a lot of jokes. They like to party; they always like to be around people. That’s an extroverted person. And they can also be unhappy, worried, anxious, depressed, frustrated, disappointed. I mean living with someone like that’s quite a trip, because they’re just all over the place. But there are people like that, because you can be high in negative emotion and you can be high in positive emotion or low in both or whatever, and it’s useful to know that.

It’s useful to know that about your partner and about the people around you. If you are interested in this sort of thing, by the way, I have a personality test online at understandmyself.com, and you can go there. It takes about 15 minutes and it gives you five dimensions of personality: extroversion, neuroticism—that’s positive and negative emotion—agreeableness, which is like, it’s probably the maternal instinct dimension, but at least it’s the variance between compassion and competitive aggression. It’s something like that, and that looks like a continuum. There’s another dimension which is trait conscientiousness, which is integrity and dutifulness, orderliness, industriousness.

Then finally, the fifth dimension, which is openness, which is like a hybrid between intellect, intelligence broadly, and creativity. You can go there and find out how you compare to other people, and that’s kind of interesting and useful because it’s kind of useful to know who you are, to know that that’s actually who you are, you know, that you have a nature. Some of that stuff’s movable, but it’s not as movable as you think, and the farther you want to move it, the harder it is to move. Like you can take an introvert, you know. You’re an introvert if when you’re around people, you get exhausted by it. You have to go off by yourself and recover. You know, then you’re an introvert.

If you’re an introvert, you don’t really like being in groups, and so sales, you know, maybe that's not for you. You know? And that’s a good thing to know, because if you’re an introvert, why go be a salesperson and be miserable? Do something where you can spend time alone and not be miserable. That’s better. You might as well match your occupation to your temperament rather than the other way around.

Now, you know, you can take an introvert. I’ve worked with lots of introverts who, who say, had made pretty good progress in their careers, and they were at a point where they had to do a lot of social networking. Otherwise, they were going to hit a plateau in their career. They could be taught the skills of extroversion, sort of one at a time, rather painfully, so they could learn them. They could accrue the skills, and that would broaden their personality outward into the, say, extroverted end of the continuum, but it didn’t make them extroverts.

So they were still temperamentally introverts. So, you know, if you’re a neurotic person, high negative emotion, you can learn to regulate your anxiety and so forth, but you hit a point of diminishing returns, and it’s difficult; it’s effortful. So anyways, back to Eysenck and then back to Jeffrey Gray. So Eysenck identified extraversion and introversion, or extroversion, and neuroticism, and that’s going to be very important in a minute. And Gray elaborated on Eysenck’s theories to a large degree, but he did that neurologically. He was a master of the animal experimental literature, and a lot of that’s being phased out of universities because the regulations for animal experimentation have become so onerous and difficult that it’s much easier for beginning scientists just not to bother.

That’s a real catastrophe because we have learned a lot about the brain in the last 50 years. A lot. We’ve learned very little about the brain from PET scans and MRI scans and like that complicated technology used to study human beings. An unbelievable amount by studying animals. You might think rats in particular. And you might think, well, you know, rats, why? They’re not much like human beings, you know? But that’s wrong. You share, I don’t know what it is, 98.5% of your genetic structure with rats; some of you probably more than that. And you know, we haven’t devolved from the common ancestor with rats from an evolutionary perspective that long ago. I mean, like it’s millions of years ago, but it’s short compared to how long ago we devolved, let’s say, from amphibians.

So we’re a lot like rats, man. We have the same skeletal structure, and our brains are quite similar, and the neurochemistry is very, very, very similar. I mean, the neurochemistry is similar right down to the level of crustaceans, which is why I wrote about lobsters in Rule One, because our, because I thought it was so bloody amazing when I came across that literature to see that when lobsters are defeated in a social contest, and they lose their hierarchical position, that they undergo neurochemical changes that are analogous to the neurochemical changes that human beings undergo. That’s amazing.

And that the same damn drugs that help us, antidepressants essentially, also cheer up defeated lobsters. I mean, it’s such a staggering demonstration of the continuity of biology across unbelievable spans of time. Critics have complained that I cherry-picked the data, but they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. I studied the serotonin system for a very, very long time, and I know perfectly well that one of the things that it does is monitor your position in a social hierarchy. And it’s more important than that because the serotonin system is a master control neurochemical system. It’s like the conductor of an orchestra. Everything in your brain depends on the serotonin system, which is why you think about it like an antidepressant; it decreases the rate at which neurons will reuptake serotonin. You need serotonin to modulate the way your neurons work.

You take an antidepressant, and the serotonin works a little longer. Okay, so what’s the consequence of that? Well, let’s say you’re depressed. Okay, we’ve got to think about being depressed for a minute. When you’re depressed, this is what happens: all you remember about the past is what’s negative. So everything about the past is negative; all you can see in the present is what’s negative; everything about the present is negative; and nothing about the future is positive at all. That’s interesting because it means that something has shifted inside you, let’s say neurophysiologically, that changes the way you view everything—your entire past, the present, and the entire future.

What it essentially does is exaggerate negative emotion to a tremendous degree. That’s depression and suppress positive emotion. Now, there can be variants in that. Sometimes you see depressed people, and they come—you can think about your own mood in this way. You might say, well, I’m not that sad, but I’ve just sort of lost my interest in everything. Okay, so that means that what’s happened is your positive emotion system has been suppressed because the positive emotion system is what gives you that interest in things that pulls you forward to action. Okay?

Now, the negative emotion system that’s anxiety—that’s a huge part of it, frustration, disappointment, grief, pain—that kind of covers it. Anger is, well, though anger is a bit complicated because it’s half a positive emotion and half a negative emotion, which is why it feels so good to get angry, by the way, and why it also impels you to action, whereas most negative emotions stop you.

So in any case, if your serotonin system, if your serotonin function declines, then all of a sudden everything is negative. You think, well, isn’t that interesting? How the hell can it be that something can change within you that changes everything? And the answer has to be, well, it must be a fundamental system that’s been changed, right? Because if it changes everything, it has to be a system on which all other systems depend—and that is the case with the serotonin system. And that’s really worth knowing, especially when you also know that the serotonin system counts where you are in the social hierarchy.

There’s this weird kind of one-to-one correspondence. Imagine a social hierarchy has 10 levels. I don’t care what hierarchy you’re in. Most people’s hierarchies are actually quite small. They sort of consist of the people that they compare themselves to. You know, which is a strange thing too because one of the things that you see happening with really successful people is they actually don’t get a lot happier and a lot less unhappy as they climb the broad social ladder because the people they compare themselves to change.

So, I can tell you a funny story about this. So, I know this guy. I worked with him for a long time. His name is Adeo Ressi, and he’s a hell of a guy. He’s like six foot seven, and he’s like really charismatic, and he’s been pretty successful. He built this company in San Francisco called Founder Institute, and it’s only one of many things he’s done. It’s operating in 165 cities. It’s a school to teach people how to be entrepreneurs. He’s trying to export Silicon Valley, what would you call it, know-how, technological and financial, to the rest of the world.

In like five years, he built 165 schools—not physical schools, but school-like organizations—around the world. Go try that! Like, that’s really hard. You know, just to build one is hard, but to do that in multiple languages all over the world is bloody well impossible. And then at the same time he built his organization, he started 2,500 successful companies as a consequence of building this school. That’s pretty good, you know?

And he was having a rough time and was talking to me on the phone about, you know, he wasn’t so happy about what he’d done with his life, and he said, “Geez I compare myself with my roommate, and you know, I’ve hardly done anything.” And his roommate was Elon Musk.

It’s like, I just laughed at him. I thought, geez, really? That’s what you’re gonna—you haven’t done anything compared to Elon Musk, and you’re depressed about it? It’s like, yeah, well, you and the rest of the planet. I mean, look what Musk did! What did he do? He invented an electric car—that’s impossible. Then he made it work—that’s impossible. And then he built an entire infrastructure to charge it, and that worked, and that’s impossible, and then they’re good cars. And then he made them faster than any cars have ever been and cheap. And so that’s impossible! And then that wasn’t good enough, so then he decided that he would compete with NASA, which is impossible, and build rockets at one-tenth the price they were building them, except bigger.

Then he would shoot his car on his rocket out into space, right? And he did all that. And it’s like, “Adeo, I was thinking, I’ve hardly done anything with my life.” It’s like, oh. So my point is that, you know, you primates of our type sort of have a group size that we think about as our group of about 200 people.

So like on Facebook, for example, the probability that you’re in something approximating reasonable constant communication with more than 200 people is low. You just don’t have the time. You can’t keep track of it. So our natural group is something like 200, and our groups tend to fragment when they get bigger than that, and that’s also associated, by the way, with cortical size. You see this in primates, is that as primates develop larger brains, the group size they seem to be able to manage also increases. And that might be part of the reason why they develop larger brains. Who knows?

But anyway, it’s about 200 people. The problem is is that as you get more successful, say in the global hierarchy of 100 million people, the 200 people that you compare yourself to change. And so that you end up with 100 million dollars and you’re not very happy because your 50 billion yacht is like 20 feet shorter than your friend’s 150 million dollar yacht.

And so, and you’re high in neuroticism, so that makes you frustrated and disappointed, you know? So anyways, it’s important—it’s important to understand that the message here, the point of this is that you have a system, the serotonin system, base of your neural physiology. It also sets your brain up during embryonic development. So it really is the master control system in many, many ways.

It counts where you are in your hierarchy, and then it decides how much positive emotion and how much negative emotion you should feel on average because of your position. And so, like if you’re, let’s say number one is at the top and number ten is at the bottom, so you’re number ten, you’re barely clinging to the bottom of reality—your brain says, “Look, it’s dangerous where you are at the bottom of the hierarchy. You don’t have a lot of friends. It’s precarious down there.”

So that means any little thing that goes wrong, any little error you make, that might be the end of you. And so, you better be on guard and alert, and if something small happens, it better hurt because it might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. And there’s nothing pleasant about that. Like, of course, why would there be anything pleasant about a process that magnifies everything negative you feel about anything that might be wrong and not just on just one small dimension of negative emotion—not just anxiety, which is bad enough, but anxiety and the pain-related emotions.

So pain-related emotions are pain, obviously. That typically indicates damage to a psychophysiological system. But grief is a pain-like emotion, and frustration is a pain-like emotion, and so is disappointment, loneliness as well. Those are all pain-like emotions and have elaborated out of an underlying pain system.

And the negative emotion system is like a tree that has branches, and each of the branches is a separate negative emotion, you know, but they’re all tied together at the root. Positive emotions are like that as well, except they’re not quite as differentiated. So if your serotonin levels fall because you’ve suffered a hierarchical defeat, then the positive emotion system gets flattened so that good things no longer feel good because it’s dangerous to take risks, perhaps, if you’re at the bottom of the hierarchy and you’re not doing very well, which is why you’re at the bottom.

Why should you have any trust in yourself? You don’t have any friends, and you’re not well-situated in the social world. You’re not going to be enthusiastically moving forward to do new things, and so your motivation for engaging in life declines. It can decline pretty much to zero. You know, if you see people who are seriously depressed, they say, well, I can’t even listen to music anymore. It just sounds flat and dead, you know?

If you talk to someone who says that about music, they’re pretty damn depressed because music is one of those things that virtually everybody always enjoys, you know, at least one genre or another. And, you know, the depressed person will describe even that the sensory quality has changed. And then they also say they’re absolutely overwhelmed with negative emotion.

So, okay, so that’s a good thing. So, that’s a good very interesting thing to know. The manner in which one of your fundamental neurochemical systems is tracking your position in a hierarchy is crucial to the maintenance of your emotional stability. Okay, so now you want to keep that in mind because that’s the first important point.

Now, the next thing I’m going to do is explain to you how it is that the way you look at the world is related to the emotions that I just described. Then I’m going to talk about how that in itself is related to the idea of hierarchy, and we’re gonna explore from there. So when you look at the world, you think that the world is made of obvious objects, and that you look at them and then you think about what they are.

Then you think about how you evaluate them and then you think about how you use them, and then you decide to act. And that’s not the case because the world doesn’t come segregated neatly into objects. It took people a long time to figure this out because when you look at the world, there it is, segregated neatly into objects, right? It takes no effort at all except it takes half your damn brain to do that, right?

We’re very visual creatures. We have great visual systems, and so a tremendous amount of metabolic energy and evolutionary expenditure of time has gone into providing us with a visual system that just breaks the world up into obvious objects for us. And it isn’t even right because we don’t actually see objects; what we see are more like tools and obstacles. We just think they’re objects.

Like, when you come in here, I can give you an example of that. Okay, think about a bean bag. Okay? Think about a stump, and think about a stool. Say those are all chairs. Okay? It’s like, what do you mean they’re all chairs? What do they have in common? Objectively speaking, a bean bag doesn’t have legs. A stump is rock-hard and solid. A stool is something almost completely unlike a beanbag. Well, they’re all chairs. Well, why?

Well the answer is you can sit on them. Most of the things that we group together as objects, we group together as a consequence of functional utility, and not because they share a set of features that are objectively similar. The reason that we perceive in that manner is because we don’t really care that much about the objective features of the world, because we have to care about being alive.

What we actually care about is what things do, and so we tend to see things that do things and group together perceptually things that do things. And so, you know when you walk into a room like this, there is a trillion things you could look at. You could look at the color variation in the carpet forever. You know, if you came in here on a psychedelic, you might even do that. Right?

Well, it’s interesting because one of the things psychedelics do is they decrease the degree to which you view the world in an iconic manner, and then you see the incredible complexity that’s underneath everything, and it’s absolutely fascinating. Now, it’s not good because you shouldn’t come in here and just look at the carpet for an hour, you know? It’s not that productive unless you’re trying to re-acquaint yourself with the fundamental wonder of the world.

You know, and there’s some utility in that; artists do that. But practically speaking, it’s not that useful. What happens when you come in here? You know you have a goal in mind. You’re going to watch what happens on the stage; you’re going to listen, and so you only see what’s relevant to that. And so, what you see are chairs, and chairs are things you sit on.

So they pop up into your perceptual field just like that, and then you know what to do with the chair. You sit on it. Partly, the reason you know what to do with the chair isn’t because you look at the chair and you think, “Oh, look, a chair.” Because you didn’t do that when you came in here, right? Not a single one of you came in here and looked at the rows here and said, “Oh, look, chairs.”

Right? It’s self-evident that they’re there. What happens is that you look at the chair, and it maps the chair onto your body. Your perception prepares you for the action. So as soon as you see the chair—which has a certain shape—imagine it’s a pattern that sustains itself in time, right? Because that’s what a chair is. It’s a pattern that sustains itself across time, and that pattern is transformed into a pattern of light.

That’s transformed into a pattern on your retina, and that’s transferred into a pattern on your optical nerve, and that’s transferred into patterns all over your brain. Some of those patterns are the patterns that allow you to perceive the chair consciously, and some of them are patterns that enable your body to prepare to take position in the chair because part of what your eyes do is map right onto your motor system so that you look and you know what to do.

And it makes you a lot faster. Right? You look at something; you know what you’re supposed to do with it; your body’s prepared to do it. That’s kind of also what it means to understand something, you know? If you look at it and you know what it is, you know how to use it. It means you can just map the thing right onto your body.

Some people are very, very good at that, especially as you develop expertise at something, you just get better and better and better at that. There are people that have certain forms of brain damage—Lhermitte’s syndrome, I think it was called, if I remember correctly, also known as utilization syndrome—and these are people who have a degeneration of the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain that organizes your behavior, I would say at the highest level of abstraction.

So when you’re thinking voluntarily about what you might do, and then you go do it, it’s your prefrontal cortex that’s thought that up voluntarily, and then organized the rest of your brain to go do it. It inhibits all the other things you might do. One of the things that happens to people who have prefrontal damage, especially if it’s on the right-hand side, is they get very socially inappropriate because they have all sorts of whims and motivations and emotions that would normally be inhibited by, you know, attention to context, let’s say, and the desire for voluntary activity.

They lose that part of the brain, and so they get disinhibited. They can get disinhibited to the point where they have to be institutionalized or jailed because they start acting so inappropriately that they can’t be controlled. Anyway, Lhermitte syndrome is utilization syndrome. One of the things that happens to people who have utilization syndrome, let’s say they’re in an old folks’ home, maybe it’s a consequence of a degenerative neurological disease, and they’re walking down the hallway, and there’s an open door, and they walk through it.

They can’t help it, because what do you do with a door that’s open? You walk through it. Now, you don’t if you’re doing something else, right? But if you’re not doing something else because you haven’t got the part of you that is helping you do something else, then the object just tells you what to do. And you see this with little kids too, because whenever you present them with an object, you know, they grip, they grab it right away. They often grab it and put it in their mouths, and they do that because their mouths are already wired up completely when they’re born, right?

From a sensory perspective, and from a motor perspective, so kids are always cramming things into their mouth so that they can investigate them with their tongue and map what they are. It’s important for them to learn about the world. If you have utilization syndrome, you can’t not utilize things. You can hand someone a bottle or a cup of water who has utilization syndrome, and they’re not thirsty, and they’ll drink it because it’s a cup of water.

What is that? It’s not an object; it’s a thing to grip and drink. You know? And it’s—it’s how else can you look at this? This isn’t a cliff; it’s a falling-off place. Right? If you’re one of those strange creatures who just think it’s a cliff, and you know, you’re—I don’t know what—you’re abstracted in thought and you walk off it, then you’re dead.

It’s a lot better to perceive it as a falling-off place, which is what you do because you know what it’s like. You go somewhere that’s steep, and you kind of play with the edge a little bit. You can feel the falling-off place map itself onto your whole body. It’s kind of a strange—I suppose an interesting experiment to play with that. You know, you might be back here, and you think, yeah, that’s not too bad; I wonder if I can get a little closer.

And maybe you can, and maybe you can get—well, maybe you can get too close, and then you’re an evolutionary mistake. So, but, you know, you get close enough, and maybe you peer over and think, yeah, that’s enough. You can feel the falling-off place map itself onto your body. That’s how you perceive with your emotions and your motivations and your action systems way more than you think.

So it isn’t object picture on your eye, picture in your brain, thought, emotion, and then action. That’s not how it works. You’re representing the world at multiple levels in your nervous system at the same time. You need to, and one of those levels is emotional.

So, okay, so here goes for the emotional part now: look, and this is just as important as the serotonin idea, I would say, which means it’s really important because the serotonin idea is really important to know that your position in the social hierarchy determines the balance between your positive and negative emotion. That’s like a crucial insight into human behavior. And that we have a positive emotion system, and that we have a negative emotion system, and that they’re separate—those are unbelievably important discoveries, all by the way virtually all made by animal experimentalists, just so you know, because they deserve some credit.

So now, the issue is, how is your perception related to your emotion? So it looks like this, and this is much—much of this I learned from Jeffrey Gray. Now, Gray was a student of Eysenck but he’s also a student of someone named Norbert Wiener, who was a cyberneticist at MIT. He established the field of cybernetics, and he was one of the first people who—he was one of the founders of computational science. He was a big deal, Norbert Wiener, and his work had tremendous impact on all sorts of fields, and he was trying to figure out how to generate autonomous self-correcting systems.

Let’s say intelligence systems and us among them because we're autonomous self-correcting systems. So Gray knew about Norbert Wiener’s work, and he integrated that with Eysenck’s work and then with all the psychobiology, and he came up with a lovely set of ideas that are extraordinarily useful. And here’s one of them: We live inside—we perceive, this is part of perceiving the world as a story.

We perceive the world as a place to go from one location to another, so you can imagine that we’re on a journey. That’s our life; it’s a journey. And it might be a ten-minute journey; it might be a 15-minute journey; it might be a journey of a week; it might be the journey of a month or the journey of a lifetime. Maybe what you would want is that the journey of a minute and 10 minutes and a week and a month and a year culminate into the journey of a lifetime.

You could imagine that you would want some continuity across all that so that there was some what would integrity to your existence so that each part of what you were doing was related in some intelligible way to the whole. That would be an ideal. When you think of someone as being integrated, right, as having character or something like that, that’s really what you mean, is you mean that all the parts of what they do fit somehow into an integrated whole.

And so that’s kind of interesting to know too because if you have a value system that’s well-structured, then all the little things you do are part of the big thing that you’re doing, whatever that big thing is. And you are doing that big thing, okay?

So, that’s another thing to keep in mind. Now, you’re looking at the world; you’re a creature of action. You have to be a creature of action because you have to act in order to live, because if you don’t act, well then you fall apart, and you’re overwhelmed by despair and negative emotion, and you starve to death, and you die. And so, not acting, not an option.

So unless you’re willing to take the consequences I just described, you better look at the world as a place to act. So how do you act? Well, you’re somewhere; you should know where you are, by the way. That’s very helpful psychologically. Imagine you have a map; you’re in a car, and you don’t know where you are. You’re trying to get somewhere. The map’s not helpful because you don’t know where you are. So, even if you know where you’re going, but you don’t know where you are, the map isn’t useful.

The same really does apply to your life. If you don’t know where you are, it’s very hard to map out where you’re going, and that has consequences for emotion as well because going somewhere is actually what activates the positive emotion system. That’s what it’s for. The positive emotion system is to facilitate movement forward to a better place; that’s its function.

So that’s so interesting because it means that if you’re not moving forward to a better place, then you don’t have any positive emotion. And there’s another conclusion that you can derive from that too, which is that if you don’t have a value system, you don’t have any positive emotion because the value system is what posits that one thing is worth doing more than another. And if one thing isn’t worth doing more than another, then you don’t have any place valuable to go.

And if you don’t have any place valuable to go, then you don’t have any positive emotion. When people are criticizing hierarchies, which they do a lot, especially politically—there shouldn’t be hierarchies, it’s like, really? Really, there shouldn’t be hierarchies? Say how is it that you propose to look at the world? Because you look at the thing that you think is most important to look at at that point, and if you couldn’t, you wouldn’t even know what to look at.

You know, maybe you’ve seen—I’ve seen videos, YouTube videos, of cameras that have been dropped from space accidentally. Maybe it wasn’t accidentally; it might have been part of an advertising campaign for maybe one of those—you-go things? What do they call those? What is it? Yeah, GoPro; that's it. So they dropped one, I think, from like 30 miles up, and it spun around all the way down and videotaped it. It’s like, pretty dull.

Because why? Well, because it’s not pointed at anything. It’s not directed towards anything. Like it’s a perfectly objective portrait of reality that’s absolutely pointless, right? Because there’s nothing—is zeroing in on anything? You know, and you even—to organize your damn vision, even to focus your eyes, you have to have a value hierarchy because you have to be focusing on something that you think is important. If you think it’s important, it has to be more important than other things; in fact, it has to be more important than everything else at that moment because otherwise you wouldn’t be focusing on it.

And so, there’s no getting rid of hierarchies—not unless you want to disregard your perceptual structures entirely and sacrifice your emotional stability. No more positive emotion, plenty of confusion, though. Be immobilized, and then also sit there, do nothing, and suffer and die, and so let the idea that there’s something intrinsically wrong with hierarchies—that's really deeply wrong.

It’s deeply and stupidly wrong at multiple levels. Then the question becomes more appropriately, well, what should the hierarchy be, and not whether or not there should be one? It’s like, and, you know, it’s not like I’m not cognizant of the negative consequences of hierarchies. It’s not like they’re all positive.

I mean, no matter what hierarchy we set up to pursue what goal, it doesn’t matter what the goal is; some people turn out to be better at doing that, and some people turn out to be worse, and the people who turn out to be worse pay a fairly heavy price for being worse. So you set up a hierarchy; there are more people at the bottom that are worse, pay a fairly heavy price. So it’s not like hierarchies are without cost, and I would say to the degree that the left end of the political spectrum has a valid point—our valid point is pay some attention to the people at the bottom of the hierarchies because it’s a rough place to be—and keep the hierarchies fair, so that people can move up and keep them focused on their tasks, so they’re doing useful things and aren’t corrupted by people who are only seeking power—all of that fine.

No hierarchy? That’s a bad idea; that’s a non-starter. Okay, so now you’re deciding to go somewhere, and it doesn’t matter where it is—a small-scale journey or a large-scale journey because a large-scale journey is composed of a multitude of small-scale journeys.

So I’ll give you an example of this. I’m going to build up a moral hierarchy for you from the bottom, okay? Here’s one of the things that’s kind of cool about doing this because it actually solves to some degree the mind-body problem if you do that.

Imagine that you’re going to do something like prepare dinner. You might think that’s a good thing. So, that’s interesting, so it’s an action. But we’d also put a moral dimension on it. It’s good to feed hungry people, yourself included. Maybe you do a good job of making dinner; that’d even be better. Not only are you making dinner, but you’re making a good dinner, and so that makes making dinner an even more impressive moral feat because you could make some wretched, cold, dismal, massive, glutinous catastrophe and serve it with contempt and hatred to the people that are around you, you know? You could do that, and it would still be dinner.

But, you know, it’d be a low quality, it’d be a low quality and an all-too-common occurrence. But let’s say that you do it right, you know? It’s like you’re going to put some effort into it. It’s going to be delicious. That’d be nice. It’s going to be nutritious; it’s going to be attractive, and it’s going to be served with the proper attitude. You know, you’re happy that you have some food. That’s kind of nice. It hasn’t been all that long that everybody had food.

Certainly, it hasn’t been all that long that everybody had a vast variety of high-quality food. So, a little gratitude would be nice. So you got your—you’re going to make dinner. So the question is, well, what exactly do you do to make dinner?

And it’s kind of an abstract idea to make dinner. You can say that abstractly, but when you actually go to make dinner, it’s not abstract anymore. You go into the kitchen and you open the refrigerator, and that’s not abstract. Right? That’s not mental; it’s physical. You’re interacting with the world. You grab the door handle on the refrigerator, and you open it. You don’t really know how you do that.

You know, I mean, I know you know how to close your hand and move your arm, but you don’t know how. You know how to close your hand and open the door. Your mind—that’s where your mind runs out. It knows how to operate your voluntary musculature, but it doesn’t know how.

So your mind grounds out in your body, and I’m going to make the case that morality does that as well. It’s part of this idea that the world is an action-oriented place. You open the fridge; you think, hey, carrots. We’re going to need some carrots. So you take the bag of carrots out of the fridge, and you put them on the counter.

You peel the carrots, and again, same thing—bit of expert behavior there, you know, because you’ve peeled carrots before, and it’s a bit deterministic because you’ve learned how to do it habitually. You peel the carrots, and you take out the parts that aren’t so edible if you have any sense.

Then you take out your knife, and maybe you have a nice knife with a nice wide blade at the end, so you can chop up carrots. It’s kind of fun to do that if you’re good at it because you can make 100 slices in 20 or 30 seconds if you’ve practiced it. And you take your carrot and you go, and then you have all these—you don’t have to make that noise, by the way, but you can if you want.

And then if you’re good at it, then all the carrots are pretty much the same thickness, and that’s kind of cool. You’ve got a little expertise there, and you’ve got all the carrots lined up. And maybe then you put them in some foil, and you add a little butter and some, I don’t know, cumin and a bit of pepper, and make them into a foil packet. This is what we do in Canada, you might do that. You guys barbecue, I’ve heard.

Then you throw the things on the barbecue, and you wait until steam puffs up the foil, and you think, done. If you have any sense at the same time, you know you’re cooking the steak and it’s done at the same time and the potatoes, and it’s all done at the same time, and it’s caramelized nicely, so it’s got a bit of sweetness. You’ve got the right amount of butter for the potatoes, and you serve it.

And that’s good. That’s good! And it took you a long time to learn that. And there’s a hierarchy there, right? So the hierarchy is the lowest part of the hierarchy is the muscular movements that you employ when you’re slicing up the carrots. There’s nothing abstract about that.

Then there’s the sequencing of the carrots in foil and the placing them on the grill and all of that; that’s where the rubber hits the road. You think, well, hey, I made a good dinner. Then you might think, well, what’s making a good dinner a subset of? You might think, well, you know, if you’re a good friend, good parent, maybe one of the things that you could do is make a good dinner.

Like it’s not the only thing that makes a good dinner, and so I’m a good friend? It’s like, no, but maybe that’s one-fifth of it or a tenth of it. It’s some non-trivial proportion of it—necessary but not sufficient, is that right? No, no, that’s not right; it’s not necessary.

Anyways, it’s one of the things you could do to be a good friend. If you have a friend, maybe he makes you a good dinner now and then, and there’s some reciprocity there. So that’s and so you’re capable of engaging in that reciprocity, and that’s another thing that might make you a good friend.

So, let’s say there are ten things like that at that level that make you a good parent. It’s like, well, what? You can make a good meal; you can clean up the kitchen; that’s a good thing to be able to do. You can clean up the bathroom, and the rest of the house. So there’s maybe five, you know how to clean, well that’s part two of being a good parent.

You get along with your partner; you know how to negotiate with them. Some of the things you negotiate about are those lower-level tasks that you're going to engage in. It’s like, well, I made dinner; maybe you could clean up the kitchen, and there’d be some reciprocity there. If you’re a good person—which is getting a little higher up in the value hierarchy—then you can engage in that kind of negotiation.

So, but and that is exactly what you would be engaging in, negotiating those tasks. And so, well, maybe you’re the sort of partner that can communicate with your partner. Maybe you’re the sort of parent that can bring their children into the kitchen and teach them the mechanical elements of food preparation starting at the bottom, right?

I mean maybe you’re not going to give them the sharp knife to begin with but you might get them to set the table. It’s like they’re two and a half. It’s like the table needs to be set. Here’s a spoon, kid; take the spoon. The kid can do that. He knows what a spoon is.

You don’t say, “Set the table for a dinner party of 20” to a two-and-a-half-year-old, right? Because they haven’t got that level of abstraction mastered. You say, “You see this? Yes. Pat. Pat. Here’s a spoon. Yes. Can you say spoon? Spoon. Good! Good! Take the spoon. Take it. Good. You know where the table is? Yes. How about if you go put the spoon on the table?” It’s like, yeah, I can do that.

So the kid wanders over and puts the spoon on the table, and then maybe comes back and looks at you, and they look at you to think, “Did I get the spoon on the table right? Did I do it right?” That’s one thing. Did I undertake the action correctly? That’s one thing. And was it a good action, right? Did I do something that was morally appropriate? They’re trying to check both of those out at the same time.

You pat them on the head and you say, “Hey, good job, man. You’re growing up.” And by that, you also signify to them that growing up is a good thing. That’s also important.

Then you say, “Well here’s another spoon. You’re going to encounter lots of spoons in your life. Why don’t you go put it on the table too?” And so, you know, they put the spoons on the table, and then maybe you show them how the spoons might be arranged, and then maybe you trust them with a fork, and then they can do the same thing, and then with a knife—a dull butter knife sort of thing at least to begin with—and with the dishes, and you teach them bottom up, right? Reflex upward.

You teach them the mechanics of preparing something complex, and so they have all those micro-skills embedded in them, so to speak. At some point, with a certain amount of training—might take three months, four months, six months—you can say, “Set the table.” They know exactly what to do. They don’t know what to do until they have all those micro-routines mastered.

That’s kind of cool because what it indicates is that the command—the macro command, “Set the table,” is only something that has a meaning when the micro processes that are motoric have already been mastered. That’s a really good way of thinking about how you’re constituted. Like you have a lot of skills, things you can do with your body, action-oriented skills and perceptual skills. Once you have them as part of you, then other people can refer to them, and you understand each other.

That’s partly how we understand each other, is that we share a hierarchy of skill and perception that’s built from the bottom up to a very high level of abstraction and also a very high level of isomorphism, meaning it’s the same for everyone.

So, okay, I already established that you have to do things, and I’m going to elaborate on that claim a little bit. So you have to do things, and you have emotional systems that help you decide whether you’re on the right path, because if you have to do things, you’re on a path, and if you’re going somewhere, you better be on the right path.

So then, you need something to tell you whether or not you’re on the right path. That’s what your emotions do; your positive emotion and your negative emotion—they’re orienting systems that tell you whether you’re on the right path, and the path is defined by the goal. So you need a goal.

So that’s the first thing to think about. It’s really, really, really, really important to think about this. If your life is not the way you want it to be, it’s possible that your goal is not what it should be, and that’s a fundamental religious teaching, by the way, I would say.

That might be the fundamental religious teaching of Buddhism, right? Because the Buddhists teach, in some sense, that everything is maya or illusion. It’s a complicated idea, but partly what it means is the way the world manifests itself to you is in large part determined by your aim within the world.

So by switching aim, you can switch whether something is positive or negative. Like let’s say you come home and you find your wife is having an affair. It’s like, man, you’re not happy. You’re one bitter, twisted, angry person. And you know, you go down to the bar and you have a few drinks, and you think, “God, you know, I really never liked her.”

You think, “Hey, this is the best day of my life. My wife had an affair.” It’s like, “I’m free.” I know this is a ridiculous story, but you get my point. You think, well, isn’t it so strange? It’s like half an hour ago, I was bitter and twisted and angry and resentful and anxious and frustrated and disappointed because there was something I wanted and I wasn’t getting it, and now all of a sudden I’ve decided I didn’t want that, and everything is switched around.

That’s a miracle that can happen. So in Rule 6, the rule is, “Put your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.” Well, so what’s the idea? It’s like, well, if the world isn’t up to your standards, let’s say. First of all, you might ask yourself about that to begin with. It’s like, “The world isn’t up to your standards?” Really? That’s the world’s problem somehow?

It’s not more likely that—it’s given that you’re talking about the world here, it’s not more likely that there’s some chance that it’s your problem. And that if you put yourself right, then the world wouldn’t appear to be a problem. I mean, it’s a profound question.

And I’m not throwing that out cynically or sarcastically. I mean, I’ve been disenchanted with the world a fair number of times personally. I’m including myself in the list of people who make that error. But you know, knowing that your emotional reactions are dependent on your aim and that that’s actually technically true does immediately open up the question: “Hey man, if things aren’t laying themselves in front of you the way that is necessary for you to live a full and engaged life and not be cynical and bitter and twisted and cruel and vengeful and disappointed,” that it’s just possible that you’re not aiming at the right thing.

And man, that is a question worth asking. Well, it’s the question people do ask. It’s like, well, what’s the purpose of life? Well, it’s the same question. What should I aim at? Those are the same questions. And you know, if what you’re aiming at is producing nothing but unrequited misery for you and everyone else, and it’s a downhill bloody spiral into something approximating hell, then there’s some possibility that you should think that perhaps your aim is off.

I don’t want to overplay my hand on that either too because I know perfectly well that if you’re suffering, if you’re depressed, if you’re miserable, there might—you might just—it might be a consequence of really bad luck. You know, like people get sick and good people get sick, right? Everyone knows that. You know, good people, they get sick and they die.

You can’t say, well, if you’re miserable and sick, it’s because there’s something bad about you—because then that would be the case for everyone, always, whenever they get ill. And you could just blame the old people. It’s like, well it’s seriously, right? You’re sick because you’re a bad person.

It happens a lot, actually, with ill people. You know, it’s an unfortunate thing. So I know there’s an element of chance to all this, and I don’t want to downplay that. You know, we are dust in the wind, to use a terrible cliché from a 70s rock song. We’re blowing hither and thither by events that are somewhat beyond our control, but that’s still not the point.

The point is that to a large degree, you can determine the manner in which the world manifests itself to you by changing your aim. And so then that opens up the entire domain of philosophy. You think, what good is philosophy? And people think that all the time. What good is philosophy? It’s like, hey, philosophy is about value. Well, what use is value? Well, value determines your aim.

Well who cares what your aim is? Well, your aim determines the manner in which the world lays itself out to you emotionally. Well, who cares about that? No one says that. The argument stops there because no one—especially no one who’s been seriously hurt or seriously depressed, like in pain, no one ever says, “Oh, well, who cares about that?”

Because if you can say that about your pain, all that means is you actually haven’t been in pain. Because if you’re in enough pain, you will not say that, that’s for sure. So you need to know what to aim at. So now you aim at something. You’ve got a goal. Then you see that you’re making progress towards the goal. That’s a good thing. That makes you happy.

It actually technically, there’s a system, a dopaminergic system, a neurochemical system—same system, by the way, that cocaine and methamphetamine and opiates activate, which is why people like to take those drugs—and it tells you that you’re moving forward in the manner that you should be according to the dictates of your plan.

It doesn’t necessarily tell you whether you have a good plan. That’s a more complicated problem because who knows if you have a good plan? But one thing that you could know is that a plan is better than no plan. That’s a really useful thing to know, especially if you’re kind of drifting. It’s like, well, I’m going to find myself.

It’s like, no, just pick something and move towards it. And as you move towards it, you’re going to succeed and fail specifically, and then you’re going to learn something about success specifically, and you’re going to learn something about failure specifically, and then you can learn what you use to fix your plan.

So a stupid plan is way better than no plan, and you’re likely to have a stupid plan or at least to be able to make one. So that’s good news for everybody. You can make a stupid plan. And so I would say make a stupid plan and then implement it—not any stupider than it has to be, you know? You could think about it a little bit, but then implement it and have your successes and failures along the way and learn from them. Then you can rig—you can rejig the goal.

You can move the target. That’s fine. That’s part of the game. It doesn’t have to be fixed; it’s a movable target. And maybe what you’re trying to do is to move the target to an ever better place. So you’re moving towards a target, and at the same time, you’re moving the target, right?

And you’re trying to move the target towards something like an ultimate ideal. You’re trying to find out what that ultimate ideal is. Part of the way you figure that out is by moving towards a target and by learning about success and failure along the way because then you can inform yourself with regards to what might constitute a reasonable aim.

That’s the reason to go out in the world and make some mistakes. And then you’re going to—so it’s okay because it’s okay to make the mistakes. It’s not so okay not to learn from them because then you make the mistakes again. That seems pointless.

So you’re moving towards wherever you’re going, and it’s working. And so you get some positive emotion; you get some motivation from this dopaminergic system that adds zest to life. It adds interest and engagement and meaning to life. It pulls you into life, and so that’s worth thinking about, I would say, because if you think about it, you might wonder about whether or not you should be engaged in life.

Then if all of a sudden you’re doing something, and because you’re doing it, you get engaged in life, then it seems like that might be the very definition of a good thing. It’s evidence—the engagement is evidence that you’re actually doing a good thing, a worthwhile thing in life, with all its suffering and misery and brutality.

It’s like you’ve got a pathway; you’ve got an aim; you’re moving forward. You’re engaged. Excellent! Your nervous system, very deep down, this dopaminergic system, it’s associated with a part of the brain called the hypothalamus. It’s a really, really old part of the brain. It’s not some new thing that popped up like 15,000 years ago; it’s ancient.

It’s there to orient you in the world; it’s part of the instinct for meaning that I talked about in chapter— I think it’s chapter seven—“Do What Is Meaningful and Not What Is Expedient.” It’s a deep, deep instinct. Way down in your psychophysiological structure—not as far down as the serotonin system, but like next level up.

If it’s saying, “Hey, man, you’re on the right track,” it’s worth noticing. You can criticize it out of existence; you can question your aim continually. It’s one of the, what would you call it, dangers of our capacity to abstract, but you know. If you’re a smart person who doubts, you also might be smart enough now and then to doubt your doubt and just to notice and to pay attention.

Something I explain to my clinical clients and my students often is, like, if you’re trying to put your life together, watch yourself for a couple of weeks. You don’t know who you are because if your life isn’t together, you don’t know who you are. So, just watch yourself like you don’t know who you are and notice now and then if you’re engaged in something, you know?

You kind of have to wake up because if you’re engaged in it, you don’t quite notice, right? Because you’re engaged in it, but afterwards you might think, “Oh, I just spent an hour, and I didn’t notice that it was an hour. I was in it.” That’s good! You’re in the right place at the right time doing the right thing.

There’s something about that that’s right. Maybe, like, you're not in good shape, and that happened to you like 15 minutes, once in two weeks. It’s like that’s pretty dismal. The rest of the time, it was wretched. Okay, fine, well maybe in the next two weeks you can see if you can do it for half an hour and then maybe for 45 minutes and then maybe for an hour, right? You can start practicing being in that place.

That’s a very useful thing to learn. It’s like, “Oh, look, I’m interested in what I’m doing; I’m engaged in it.” Now, how did I get here? Where am I exactly, and how did I get here, and how could I stay here? How could I be here more often? Those are all questions you have to ask yourself.

Well, that’s the beginning of philosophy as well. You think, well, why bother? And the answer is, well, do you want to be engaged in your life? Well, why would you? Well, it’s positive; it’s analgesic; it fights off pain; it quells anxiety; it gives you purpose; it’s good for you, practically speaking, generally speaking. If you have an aim and you’re moving forward, you’re moving forward to something that’s psychologically valuable, but also practically valuable if it’s really a good aim, also it’s good for you now, tomorrow, the next day, the next month, because you’re smart enough to—generally smart enough to calibrate yourself so that things that are really bad for you don’t have that engaging quality.

Now, it’s not perfect, especially if you’ve messed yourself up psychologically by lying to yourself in all sorts of different ways, but it’s still not a bad orienting system. Then the other thing you can also notice is, well, when are you doing things that make you feel really awful by your own standards? It’s like, “Oh look, I just did something, had some interaction with someone, and now I feel awful.”

It’s like, well, maybe you could not do that—whatever it was. You might have to think it through. What were the routines that constituted that ill-advised set of actions? You might have to think really deeply about it, you know, because God only knows how much of your personality structure is involved in that error.

But if it made you wretched; it made you feel like life wasn’t worth living, then that might be a hint that that wasn’t a good thing to do. And so then maybe you could start doing more of the things that make you engaged and less of the things that make you hate life. That’s worthy! That’s worthy of practice.

Let’s say you might think about that as a—it’s a fundamental ethical requirement. I would say it’s a fundamental form of religious meditation. That’s a better way of thinking about it. So then you’re on the path; that’s the straight and narrow path. It’s like I’m moving forward; I’ve got a name. I’m moving forward; as I move forward, I’m engaged.

It’s bloody well worth walking down this pathway. And you know, on the left of me is terror and horror and hell and pain, and I’m avoiding that. To the right of me, perhaps, is ego and arrogance and the things that can get out of control with regards to positive emotion. But I’ve got that balance right; I’m on the right pathway.

Okay, now let’s think about what might constitute the right pathway. Well, I can tell you a pathway that works for me to some degree. So, this is a value structure that’s characteristic of me, of things I do. I type because I write. That’s pure action, right? I type letters; I type words; I type phrases; I type sentences; I type paragraphs; I type chapters; I write books.

Then, people—and then I talk about the books and people read the books, and the reason that they can understand the books is because we're a lot the same, you know? Like there’s a lot of things that have to be the same about you and me before I can write a book that you can read, and I have to be able to take them for granted.

The reason I’m telling you that is that there’s an important relationship between my hierarchy of values and your hierarchy of values if we’re going to be able to communicate. If we’re going to be able to occupy the same place at the same time, you know.

So if I’m writing a book like "12 Rules for Life" and it has a discussion about what constitutes the good in it, then I have to start with the presupposition that we share some fundamental intuition about what constitutes the good or my words will fall on deaf ears, okay?

This is maybe the relationship between the social world and the psychological world that I wanted to talk about as I build up my hierarchy of skill and ability, perception and emotional regulation, you know, from slicing carrots upwards. You know I'm a good cook, I'm a good parent. Maybe I'm a good man; maybe I'm a good person, you know?

All of those cover a broader and broader range of abstractions and abilities. There has to be a relationship between that and what other people think, you know? Because, look, if you’re your kid, you teach your kid to set the table, and then he goes to someone else’s house and sets the table, and he gets a swat, it’s like, well, what’s the consequence of that?

Well, the consequence of that is that the kid is going to be unhappy. Well, why? Well, it’s because the kid did a lot of work building up all those separate skills to undertake that complex activity—and it really is a complex activity. You don’t have a robot at home that sets the table. You know, you have a cell phone, and it’s smart, but it can’t set the damn table. It’s complicated to do that sort of thing.

Your kid built this complicated neurological structure as a consequence of reward primarily because reward helps build neurological structures. Built this whole structure, and now what he’s hoping is that all the work that went into building that structure is something that other people will appreciate as well.

So that’s where you need the isomorphism between the intrapsychic structure, the psychological structure, and the social structure, which is why we have to have a shared social reality. This is partly why I think the postmodernists went off the rails so badly with their insistence that the world was only language. It’s like, it is in some sense very important that you construe the world the same way I do, even though there’s a very wide range of ways of construing the world.

We come to some negotiated agreement about what’s good and what isn’t so that when I do things that I think are good, you also think they’re good so that I get rewarded for my good behavior, and I get, let’s say, punished for my bad behavior because that’s often a relief as well, by the way. We have to have our own internal structure of values that we’re pursuing because otherwise we don’t have any meaning in our life, and that’s no damn good.

Then it has to be nested inside a shared structure of values that’s similar so that when we act out what we have learned to be good, we’re treated by the world as if that’s good, and then we have peace. That’s the definition of—that’s a definition of a functioning political system. We’ve organized a moral game, a very